Nothing says "I've grown as a developer" quite like wanting to pour Tabasco directly into your eyeballs after seeing your old code. That burning sensation is just your brain trying to cauterize the memory of variable names like temp1 , finalFinalActuallyFinal , and those magnificent 200-line functions that "just work, don't touch it." The best part? You wrote comments like "Fix this later" that you're only discovering now, 12 months later. Progress isn't measured in lines of code—it's measured in how physically painful your old code is to look at.